Uncertainty markers in spoken learner discourse

This study compares stance marker frequencies, part of speech frequencies, and the most common stance markers in British and American conversations. The corpus is comprised of 100,000 words of spoken English taken from conversations at home in America and Great Britain, excerpted from the Longman Corpus of Spoken and Written English. Stance marker frequencies are generated through the computer program, StanceSearch, which automates the identification of stanced lexical items occurring in particular grammatical frames. Four categories of stance markers are examined: affect (marking emotion and attitude), evidentials (marking certainty, doubt, and commitment), amount (marking hedges and emphatics), and modality (modal verbs). Similarities are found in American and British conversations in stance category and part of speech use. There is a strong relationship between part of speech and stance category: affect is expressed with adjectives and verbs, amount is adverbial, and evidentials are verbal. The main differences are in lexical choice. The British conversations have lower frequencies than American conversations in emotion-expressing affect markers, first-person verbs which express emotive affect, and emphatics. The American conversations have lower frequencies for modals verbs. The results suggest that cultural variations are not based on differences in stance categories as a whole, but rather on subtle lexical differences. To pinpoint where cultural variation lies, these lexical differences must be examined more closely.

Interpreting subjectivity in causal relations takes effort: Subjective, claim-argument relations are read slower than objective, cause-consequence relations. In an eye-tracking-while-reading experiment, we investigated whether connectives and stance markers can play a facilitative role. Sixty-five Chinese participants read sentences expressing a subjective causal relation, systematically varied in the use of stance markers (no, attitudinal, epistemic) in the first clause and connectives (neutral suoyi “so”, subjective kejian “so”) in the second clause. Results showed that processing subjectivity proceeds highly incrementally: The interplay of the subjectivity markers is visible as the sentence unfolds. Subjective connectives increased reading times, irrespective of the type of stance marker being used. Stance markers did, however, facilitate the processing of modal verbs in subjective relations. We conclude that processing subjectivity involves evaluating how the argument supports the claim and that connectives, modal verbs, and stance markers function as processing instructions that help readers achieve this evaluation.

Stance refers to attitude, feelings, judgment or commitment of a speaker towards a proposition. A speaker employs certain linguistics features to express his stance including hedges, boosters, self-mentions and attitude markers. This research aims at analyzing stance of Indonesian writers in social and hard science journal articles written in English by examining the use of linguistic features employed as stance markers. The research result shows that the writers of social science articles use more stance marker compares to those of hard science articles. Indonesian writers maintain the objectivity of academic writing as there was very limited use of self-mentions in the articles. The stance markers used by Indonesian writers represent the positive, negative or neutral type of stance.

Stance is a growing focus of academic writing research and an important aspect of writing development in higher education. Research on student writing to date has explored stance across different levels, language backgrounds, and disciplines, but has rarely focused on stance features across genres. This article explores stance marker use between two important genre families in higher education—persuasive argumentative writing and analytic explanatory writing—based on corpus linguistic analysis of late undergraduate and early graduate-level writing in the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP). The specific stance markers in the study, both epistemic and textual cues, have been shown to distinguish student writing across levels; this study, then, extends the analysis to consider the comparative use of these markers across genres. The findings show two stance expectations persistent across genres as well as significant distinctions between argumentative and explanatory writing vis-à-vis stance markers that intensify and contrast. The findings thus point to important considerations for instruction, assignment design, and future research.

Effective academic writing is accessible to readers because writers follow shared conventions for organization and signal their stance on particular topics; however, few specifics are known about how middle graders might develop knowledge of and use these academic language forms and functions to signal their organization and stance in persuasive essays. This study examined how differences in organization and stance marker use was related to writing quality in 664 persuasive essays written by 176 sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students. Essays were collected in the context of a supplemental vocabulary program, transcribed and analyzed for length by researchers, scored for overall writing quality by a team of teachers, and then coded for markers of organization and stance by researchers. Multilevel modeling results reveal that two specific emergent organizational marker types (evidence markers and code glosses) have statistically significant negative relationships to quality, and the variety of stance markers used is a positive predictor of quality when an interaction with length is included in the model. Findings give insight into the ways students are using organization and stance markers and point toward these language forms and functions as potentially pedagogically-relevant and worth assessing.

This book is the first corpus-based description of epistemic stance in conversational American English. It argues for epistemic stance as a pragmatic rather than semantic notion: showing commitment to the status of information is an emergent interactive activity, rooted in the interaction between conversational co-participants. The first major part of the book establishes the highly regular and routinized nature of such stance marking in the data. The second part offers a micro-analysis of I think , the prototypical stance marker, in its sequential and activity contexts. Adopting the methodology of conversation analysis and paying serious attention to the manifold prosodic cues attendant in the speakers’ utterances, the study offers novel situated interpretations of I think . The author also argues for intonation units as a unit of social interaction and makes observations about the grammaticization patterns of the most frequent epistemic markers, notably the status of I think as a discourse marker.

본 연구는, 제2외국어로서 영어 학습 능률에서 담화표지는 문화적 행위로 간주되는 측면이 많다는 가정 하에 영어와 한국어 각각의 담화표지에 대한 고찰이다. 연구 결과도 역시 제2영어를 하는 한국대학생들에게 영어의 담화표지는 어색하고 발화행위 분포가 고르지 못하다는 점을 밝힌다. 한국어 모국어 화자는 담화표지를 많이 하지 않지 만, 영어를 모국어로 하는 한국어 제2언어 학습자는 발화행위에서 평균 이상으로 많이 담화표지를 한다는 결론이다. 이에 대한 비교 분석의 그래프를 통해 담화표지의 종류와 발화 횟수, 퍼센티지를 비교분석 한다. 결과적으로 본 논문에서는 영어의 담화표 지는 영어 모국어 화자에게는 하나의 문화행위로서 자연스럽게 따라오는 언어행위의 문화적 양태로 결론지을 수 있으며, 한국어의 담화표지는 말을 잘 할 때 담화표지의 수와 종류가 줄어드는 것을 발견했다. 때문에 한국어 유창성과 한국어 담화표지는 반비례한다고 할 수 있지만, 영어모국어 화자로서 제2 한국어 학습자는 유난히 한국어의 담화표지를 많이 함으로써 그들의 문화 발화행위의 단면을 발견하게 된다. 한국어 담화표지에 대한 학습은 외국어로서의 한국어 교육에는 굳이 필요하지 않지만, 영어를 배우는 제2영어 학습자에게는 영어의 담화표지 학습이 필요함을 도출한다.Despite the important role discourse markers play in everyday native spoken interactions, there are only few spoken corpus-based studies on how Korean speakers use English discourse markers, particularly in their spontaneous English communication. On the other hand, English native speakers tend to use corpus-based Korean discourse markers. Using a speech task that encourages spontaneous English conversations by Korean speakers, this paper elicits the forms, relative frequencies, and usage of English discourse markers. Researching both the usage of English and Korean discourse markers by non-natives, this paper indicates that Korean ESL learners use limited and less variety of discourse markers compared with English native speakers. This paper shows that Korean speakers’ usage of certain English discourse markers may be quantitatively and qualitatively different from the typical native usage. It is relatively natural that English native speakers use yeah (어, 음) of Korean discourse markers in the act of Korean speeches. It is concluded that English discourse markers need to be taught in both explicit and implicit manners in classroom settings. It is significant, since the proper use of discourse markers plays a significant role in enabling Korean speakers to communicate in English in a more situationally and culturally appropriate manner. However, Korean discourse markers are less important for English TOPIK learners in Korean communication.

This study investigated the production of discourse markers by non-native speakers of English and their occurrences in their spoken English by comparing them with those used in native speakers’ spoken discourse. Because discourse markers (DMs) are significant items in spoken discourse of native speakers, a study about the use of DMs by nonnative speakers is necessary and guiding. Thus, the study was based on two specific corpora. First, a research corpus was composed using the transcriptions of the course presentations of twenty non-native undergraduate students studying at an English Language Teaching (ELT) program in Turkey. To compare the data, transcripts of student presentations of native speakers were attained with the help of MICASE Corpus. The occurrences of the discourse markers in both corpora were determined with frequency analysis. The results indicated that non-native speakers of English use a limited number and less variety of discourse markers in their spoken English. The study therefore highlights the importance of the need for raising non-native speakers' awareness of using discourse markers in their spoken English, and recommends implications for English language teaching.

‘Native-like’ use of discourse markers is a good indicator of language proficiency. Analysing four subcorpora of English-language tweets posted by Twitter users from the Nordic countries of Finland, Norway, and Sweden, this study considers the effects of discursive context and L1 influence on the correlation between semantic function and sentence position of the discourse marker actually. The study shows that both predictors appear to have a significant effect. A more formal context predicts more standard punctuation, distribution of the pragmatic functions, and placement of the discourse marker, and L1 influence is reflected in the preferred sentence position, with a substantial and significant difference observed between the Finnic and Germanic L1s. Furthermore, the study shows that while the discourse marker actually is significantly more frequent in colloquial Twitter language than in spoken English, the frequency is significantly lower and in line with spoken English in more constrained contexts.

Discourse markers (DMs) are difficult even for advanced L2 speakers compared with L1 speakers because of their special linguistic features. The influence of contextual factors on the use of DMs has not been examined in detail in the literature. The present article investigates the impact of speech contexts (interview vs conversation) on the use of DMs by native and advanced Chinese speakers of English. Data for the study were gathered using individual sociolinguistic interviews and group conversations. A quantitative analysis revealed that native English speakers used and and just more frequently in the interviews than in the conversations at a significant level; the Chinese speakers of English used oh, ok, and uh huh significantly more often in the conversations than in the interviews. A qualitative analysis showed that the functions of well varied across the contexts by both groups. The article further analyses the reasons for these differences: they can be due to different functions of individual markers across contexts or influence of L2 speakers’ native language (Mandarin Chinese), etc. The results indicate that the advanced L2 English speakers may not have acquired some DMs used by the native English speakers in terms of frequency and functions across the speech contexts. The article suggests that explicit instruction of functions of DMs which are difficult for L2 speakers of English can be strengthened in EFL/ESL (English as a foreign/second language) classrooms.

SAY verbs crosslinguistically have been widely reported to undergo certain grammaticalization processes and to be used as quotative markers, complementizers, evidential markers, and discourse markers. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the grammaticalization of the SAY verb zin in Kavalan, a highly endangered Austronesian language spoken on the eastern coast of Taiwan. It is shown that the Kavalan SAY verb zin has undergone the process of grammaticalization and come to be used as a semicomplementizer and stance marker. It is proposed that zin has undergone two pathways of grammaticalization and that there are two different forces underlying these two pathways. On the one hand, the mechanism of morphosyntactic reanalysis leads zin to be grammaticalized as a semicomplementizer. On the other hand, it is the forces of (inter)subjectification that lead zin to be open to being reinterpreted as a stance marker.

The present paper aims to investigate non-past copular markers in modern Standard Turkish from a comparative point of view. The following markers are analysed by taking into account their semantic, discursive and clausal properties as a whole: (1) the simple subject markers of pronominal type, including the zero realization in third person; (2) the enclitic -DIr developed from a verbal copular predication; (3) the copular markers olur and oluyor consisting of the verb ol- ‘to be(come)’ and the non-past forms -(V)r or (Ø)Iyor, respectively. The underlying research questions are: (1) What semantic contents are inherently denoted by the respective copular strategies? (2) Are there any preferences and/or restrictions in the combinability of these copular markers with subject and predicate nouns, as well as with other clausal elements? (3) Is there any distributional relation between the copular markers and the semantic types of their copular clauses? (4) What are the discursive and pragmatic properties of these copular forms? The analysis suggests that the enclitic -DIr functions as a propositional stance marker, while olur and oluyor mainly operate on predicational level, though they occur as stance markers in special pragmatic constellations.

This chapter investigates the extent of similarity in the use of stance markers in two national varieties of West African English, Nigerian English and Ghanaian English, and compares them to British English. The frequency and stylistic variability of four semantic groups of stance markers were examined in ICE-Nigeria and ICE-Ghana and compared with ICE-Great Britain. The results are mixed: the two West African varieties show an overall lower frequency of stance markers compared to British English but the speakers of the two West African English varieties do not demonstrate lower stylistic variability in the use of stance markers across different text types. Notwithstanding, there are systematic differences in stance marker usage between the two West African English varieties.

‘Jackpot!’: How social forces intertwine with language-internal mechanisms to turn Korean noun taypak into an interactive

This study examines how Chinese as a Second Language (CSL) learners acquire the Chinese stance marker haihao with a focus on type and saliency. A total of 56 participants took part in the research, including 28 English-speaking CSL learners and 28 native Chinese speakers. The study utilized two evaluation judgment tasks. Results showed that participants categorized haihao into two simplified groups, guided by the economy principle and a positivity bias. English-speaking learners, influenced by a stronger positivity bias, tended to select more positive options, while Chinese participants favored slightly negative ones. Saliency improved the accuracy of recognizing negative haihao among American learners and low positive haihao among Chinese participants, though it was less effective for ambiguous expressions. These findings highlight how cultural differences and language saliency impact the interpretation of stance markers, offering insights for improving CSL teaching strategies.